cPanel® Blog

Being a Good Open Source Community Member: Why we hesitated on MySQL 5.7

The open source community is great, largely because it is powered by the passion of its members. Much of that passion is rooted in Doing What’s Right™*, but often there are lengthy discussions about what specifically that means. I want to talk a bit about one particular part of the open source community, and how it has made cPanel as a company react.

Why we hesitated on MySQL 5.7

In January of 2015 we released cPanel & WHM version 11.48, and with it came support for MariaDB to cPanel & WHM. We made this choice intentionally, as we watched the industry shift away from MySQL and to MariaDB. We anticipated MariaDB being the eventual replacement for MySQL. In addition to the industry shift, we were primarily motivated by two specific things.

First was security transparency. In our research, we found that though MySQL seemed to be good about fixing security problems, they did so without being as transparent as we are accustomed to in the open source community. We were delighted to find that MariaDB followed the patterns we were used to when disclosing security fixes.

The Second thing centered on feature additions and improvements. While this is certainly no longer the case, MySQL itself had stagnated when it came to performance and the inclusion of highly demanded features. With the changes that MySQL has since made, one might speculate that the popularity of MariaDB and Percona really helped with this, but it’s difficult to say without being part of their decision making process.

Why we’re changing our minds

Since we started pushing people to MariaDB, we’ve seen a shift in how quickly MySQL is reacting. MySQL now consistently matches or outpaces MariaDB when it comes to development and releases, which in turn is increasing the demand on us for providing those upgraded versions of MySQL by our users. We have been working over the last year to make our platform more appealing to developers, and our current lack of support for the cutting edge technology in MySQL is inconsistent with that goal.

One simple example of what we mean there would be this; when MariaDB 10.2 became stable in May 2017 it included many features found in MySQL 5.7. However, MySQL reached stable nearly 18 months earlier in October 2015.

What’s Next?

As of cPanel & WHM version 70, we will include support for MySQL 5.7, and we will continue adding support for new versions as well. We still see value in promoting and supporting MariaDB, so we will also retain support for MariaDB for the foreseeable future.

The people using and building database-driven applications are doing so with MySQL in mind, and are hesitant to add support for MariaDB. Responding to our community’s desires is one of the most important things to us, and this is something that we are hearing asked for from our community consistently.

We will also soon discontinue the building and shipping of our own MySQL RPMs (like we have done already with MariaDB) relying instead on the versions provided upstream. That will help ensure that we’re shipping things as soon as possible.